Shooting Stars | Lo'ak¹

Chapter 22: Kisses Under the Stars

Italicize - someone's thoughts or a story from the past

Bold - sign language 

Ja'lia was doing her best to enjoy the party that was held in honor of the return of the tulkun, but as time went on, her nerves grew as she realized that it was getting closer and closer to the time when she would be confessing her feelings to Lo'ak.

After all those months of doing her best to hide her feelings, Ja'lia was finally going to confess due to the kiss the two had shared the day before.

The girl wasn't sure if she was that stupid or confident that Lo'ak felt the same way she did. Hell, maybe Lo'ak only kissed her because it felt like it was the right thing to do at that moment, but Lo'ak didn't seem like the type of boy to do something like that.

Both the Sully boys were raised to respect women and as well as to never play with a woman's feelings, as that was a sign of cowardice. They were also raised to give up their seat if a woman had been standing, and to always keep their word. If Ja'lia remembered correctly, the humans called it chivalry and Jake and Neytiri combined their two drastically different parenting styles.

From where Ja'lia was sitting, she could see that Lo'ak appeared to be in a very intense conversation with Neteyam, and usually, Ja'lia would be sitting beside him, but Tsireya had asked Ja'lia to sit with her, Kiri, and Tuk. Tsireya's invitation was immediately accepted by Ja'lia because she didn't want to deal with an awkward atmosphere if she had to sit with Lo'ak.

She didn't want to be the reason anyone didn't enjoy their night.

Tuk was currently talking all three teens' ears off about what she had learned in her new training, which she was excelling at. One part of Ja'lia, the competitive part, felt jealous of how well Tuk was doing with her training, even though it could be expected. Tuk was the youngest of out all of them.

The younger someone is when trying to learn a new skill; the easier it would be for them to quickly pick up on it. So, while the teens weren't necessarily slow at learning the Metkayina way, they also weren't the quickest either.

"I can hold my breath for a long time," Tuk informed with the biggest smile on her face.

Ja'lia smiled at the youngest Sully child in pride while Tsireya told her how proud of her she was. Positive reinforcement was something that Tsireya highly encouraged, and when the Sully children started their training, it worked well on all of them, especially Lo'ak. Lo'ak had been so used to being yelled at by his father during training that when Tsireya used calm and soothing words to correct his mistake, he was extremely confused.

However, as time passed, his confusion subsided, and he started to learn at accelerated rates as well.

"I also made some new friends," Tuk said as she continued to talk about her training in excitement.

Kiri loved to see her sister so excited about something new, but if her sister continued to talk about how she could hold her breath for a 'really long time' and about her new friends, she might scream. If the youngest girl was going to continue to blabber, the least she could do was come up with something new to talk about.

"Tuk, can we please talk about something else?" Kiri pleaded, and Tuk blinked at her older sister. "What do you want to talk about?" Tuk asked as she wouldn't mind if the topic moved away from talking about herself because she was getting bored of saying the same things over and over again, but she didn't know what else to talk about.

Before she started talking, it had been completely silent, and if there was one thing Tuk hated more than anything in the entire Universe, it was silence. She knew what everyone wanted to talk about. Tuk wasn't stupid. Young? Yes. Stupid? Absolutely not.